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| Jim Carroll - Photograph Alex Waterhouse-Hayward |
Saturday
was a day of melancholy, anger and depression. I left home and walked to the
nearest refuge. The refuge was the Oakridge Branch of the Vancouver Public
Library. I brought my umbrella. The persistent rain added to my melancholy. It
takes just a few days of a Vancouver rain in the fall to make one forget all
those days of sunny heat. At my age I am already turning on the heat at home.
My first
stop at the library is always their reject book bin. It was fairly empty except
for one book that stared at me. It was Jim Carroll’s posthumously published novel
The Petting Zoo. When it came out in 2010 after his death on September 11, 2009
it was panned by most critics.
I plan to
read it. If you consider that I was charged $0.50 for it and after you
read Patti Smith’s Introduction (A Note to the Reader) you will understand that
my purchase was a steal.
From the
library I went to Oakridge Mall and sat in one of their comfortable red single
chairs and watched people go by. My melancholy became one of alienation as I
found myself feeling I was living in a foreign country. One of my plans in a
near future is to stay a few weeks in Patagonia to perhaps relieve this
enajenamiento.
I walked
home protected by my dark blue Vancouver Umbrella Shop umbrella wondering what
kind of omen (if any) was finding such an odd book in what really is a
mainstream public library going through a demographic change which might
explain the massive unloading of such good books. Below is Patti Smith's intro to Carroll's novel.
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| Jacket illustration - Raymond Pettibon |
In the
monastic seclusion of his room, Jim Carroll, with a prescience of his own
mortality, reached out and drew this novel – his last work – from the nucleus
of his mysticism and remembered experience.
The Petting Zoo unfolds with a series of fated events. The
artist Billy Wofram is so profoundly moved by the paintings of Velázquez that
he finds himself irrevocably altered. Stumbling from the Metropolitan Museum of
Art into an eddy of avalanching absurdity – a defunct Children’s Zoo, the Aztec
façade of the Helmsley Building, the bowels of a dysfunctional mental ward – he
diagnoses that he is no longer in sync with his former self. His descent and ascent, so candidly observed,
are reminiscent of René Daumal’s A Night
of Serious Drinking, as our narrator reels from numbing cocktails to the
nakedness of his mischievous soul.
The poet is
the aural lamplighter. He projects himself within the labyrinth of Billy’s
burgeoning consciousness as he seemingly adjusts to the most outrageous turns
of fortune. Jim’s mythic energy is at once laconic and vibrating; his bouts of
meandering humor are punctuated by undeniable common wisdom. Whether the
discourse is with a Chinese psychologist, a Hindu driver, or an extremely
loquacious raven, these Socratic dialogues slide pole to pole, from uncanny
clarity or a realm where digression is an art of the first order, the
multifarious zone of the nod.
Jim Carroll
died at his desk on September 11, 2009, in the Inwood neighborhood of
Manhattan, where he was born and raised. His diamond mind never ceased writing,
even as he read, scribbling copious notes in the margins of his books, the
references of his life, Frank O’Hara, Saint Francis, Bruno Schulz. He was
without guile, disdainful of his beauty, red-gold hair, lanky body, abstract,
bareheaded, empty headed. Yet he was athletic with singular focus, netting his
prey, able to pluck from the air with exquisite dexterity a rainbow-winged
insect that quivered in his freckled hand, begetting memory.
The
catastrophe of loss, the loss of a true poet, is so pure that it might for many
pass unnoticed. But the universe knows, and no doubt Jim Carroll was drawn from
his labors and the prison of his own infirmities to the distances of the
greater freedom.
Patti
Smith, May, 2010
JimCarroll Les Wiseman
I remember lying in bed listening to some evening CFOX radio
show. It was keyed to new music and was cohosted by Jerry Barad who, I believe,
worked at Quintessence Records and maybe had some financial interest in it, as
well. Barad went on to become COO of LiveNation. His role in 1980, was hepping
listeners to new product at the record shop.
He led into a cut by The Jim Carroll Band off its debut album, Catholic Boy. He told about how Carroll was a New York underground writer and poet. Then he played People Who Died.
It was terrifying. It was the bleakest, darkest most macabre song I’d ever heard. It was a litany of people who had died and the various ways they shuffled off this mortal coil.
Teddy sniffing glue,
he was 12 years old
Fell from the roof on
East Two-nine
Cathy was 11 when she
pulled the plug
On 26 reds and a
bottle of wine
Bobby got leukemia, 14
years old
He looked like 65 when
he died
He was a friend of
mine
I mean, Holy hell, what the heck was this?
G-berg and Georgie let
their gimmicks go rotten
So they died of
hepatitis in upper Manhattan
Sly in Vietnam took a
bullet in the head
Bobby OD'd on Drano on
the night that he was wed
They were two more
friends of mine
Two more friends that
died
I was no wilting lily of the valley; Lou Reed’s depression
fest, Berlin, was my favorite album, but this Jim Carroll guy was beyond the
pale. He wasn’t just down, he was the voice of total devastation and evil. He
was celebrating these deaths.
Those are people who
died, died
They were all my
friends, and they died
I lay in bed, terrified. I don’t think I slept a wink that
night. But, next morning, I know I was at the door of the record store the
minute it opened to get my hands on a copy of that dark moist thing.
Postscript 1983: AW-H and I were in Manhattan and Lenny Kaye asked us if we wanted to go the Danceteria and see Jim Carroll read his poetry.
Spectral Jim came over and joined our conversation that night. He was pale and
as cold as the grave. I bet the guy pissed ice cubes.
30
If like me you are wondering what Wiseman's above 30 means here is his answer:
People who died Patti Smith talks after this and a known stellar groups sing People who died
30
If like me you are wondering what Wiseman's above 30 means here is his answer:
TheVenerable 30 Les Wiseman
- 30 –
The 30 means your
story is done. It was particularly important when sending material by telegraph
and modem. It is still important today and you will lose marks on job tests if
you do not use it. It also lets the editor know that the writer intends the
story to end there. Many times I’ve had a story that just ends with no rhyme or
reason and I’ve had to call the writer and say, “Hey, I don’t think I’ve got
the ending to your story. I don’t have the 30 page. What was the last sentence
of your story?” They tell me; I see it and then I have to launch into an
explanation that their story doesn’t have a kicker. It just ends. Using a 30
shows your editor that they are dealing with a pro. Plus, in the modem days, I
dealt with a number of editors who didn’t receive my entire story, yet printed
it anyhow, with no discernible kicker. (Yes, Times-Colonist weekend editors I’m talking about you, you frickin’
morons.) I’d say, “Did you see the 30 at the end?” They’d say, “No.” And I
would shriek, “Then you should have known you didn’t get all of the story,
shouldn’t you, you amateur low-rent subliterate pudknocker!!!”
These days, email
is fraught with dangers, though mostly human error and many a document can get greeked
or corrupted and editors need to see what they can make of it. In order to do
that, they need to know where it ends. Plus, I like the sound of tapping out -- 30---. It sounds a bit like the opening of Louie Louie. It also means another damned piece is finished. A sweet sound for sure.
--Les Wiseman--
People who died Patti Smith talks after this and a known stellar groups sing People who died